Alexander Berkman

“ The Workhouse I The Gates of the penitentiary open to leave me out, and I pause involuntarily at the fascinating sight. It is a street: a line of houses stretches before me; a woman, young and wonderfully sweet-faced, is passing on the opposite side. My eyes follow her graceful lines, as she turns the corner. Men stand about. ”

“ The ordeal of the day's routine is full of inexpressible anguish. Accustomed to prison conditions, I yet find existence in the workhouse a nightmare of cruelty, infinitely worse than the most inhuman aspects of the penitentiary. ”

“ In republican Russia, with her enlightened social protestantism, life would be fuller, richer than in this pitifully bourgeois democracy. Freedom will present the unaccustomed problem of self-support, but it is premature to form definite plans. Long imprisonment has probably incapacitated me for hard work, but I shall find means to earn my simple needs when I have cast off the fetters of my involuntary parasitism.
The thought of affection, the love of woman, thrills me with ecstasy, and colors my existence with emotions of strange bliss. ”

“ The day will pass, it must pass. With reverent emotion I bless the shamed sun as he dips beyond the western sky. One day nearer to the liberty that awaits me, with unrestricted sunshine and air and life beyond the hated walls of gray, out in the daylight, in the open. ”

“ On the wings of an all-absorbing love I hastened to join the struggle of the oppressed people. I left home and friends, sacrificed liberty, and risked life. But human justice is blind: it will not see the soul on fire. ”

“ The threshold of liberty is thickly sown with misery and torment. The days are unbearable with nervous restlessness, the nights hideous with the hours of agonizing stillness, the endless, endless hours. ”

“ The time drags in torturing uncertainty. With each day the solitary grows more stifling, maddening, till my brain reels with terror of the graveyard silence. Like glad music sounds the stern command, "Exercise!" ”

“ The spell of the civilian garb is upon me. It gives an exhilarating sense of manhood. Again and again I glance at my clothes, and verify the numerous pockets to reassure myself of the reality of the situation. ”

“ The tasks imposed upon the men necessitate feverish exertion. Insufficient product or deficient work is not palliated by physical inability or illness. In the conduct of the various industries, every artifice prevalent in the penitentiary is practiced to evade the law limiting convict competition. The number of men employed in productive work by far exceeds the legally permitted percentage; the provisions for the protection of free labor are skillfully circumvented; the tags attached to the shop products are designed to be obliterated as Soon as the wares have left the prison ”

“ The cells are even smaller than in the penitentiary, and contain neither chair nor table. They are unspeakably ill-smelling with the privy buckets, for the purposes of which no scrap of waste paper is allowed. The sole ablutions of the day are performed in the morning, when the men form in the hall and march past the spigot of running water, snatching a handful in the constantly moving line. ”